To all 950Q owners, the PMS on my Windows 10 did not find my 950Q earlier this year, but I tried it again now and it works! Not sure if it’s because of the recent server updates? (I gave up for a couple months) The PMS detected the 950Q and showed a message that “it’s not officially supported” and asked if I wanted to try anyway; of course! I got it setup and works perfectly. I also have WinTV 8 installed, worth pointing out because I’ve read somewhere that the WinTV may affect Plex detecting the 950Q, but doesn’t seem to be the case. So give it a shot!
950Q now works on my Windows 10 PMS, and I shared the comment here.
For anyone working on trying to get the 950Q to work and landing on this thread I thought I would post my successful experience (and the associated pitfalls that ate some of my time) in case it helps speed up the process for someone else.
First, the original setup:
- QNAP TS-251+
- Native PLEX Application
- Local LAN (mix of wifi and wired clients connecting to the server…ALL within the bounds of my house… not trying to serve anything through the firewall to the internet at large)
- Clients consist of a mix of Gen 4 Apple TV’s, iPads, iPhones, Win 7 and Win 10 laptops, a Samsung 4k TV (2017 model)
- Win7 desktop PC running Windows Media Center
- Two 950Q’s connected to the Media Center machine
…Why Media Center? don’t laugh… it was the most user-accepted interface in my house that kept everyone happy. It saw these two tuners perfectly fine AND I found a littel piece of add-on software that would transcode recordings into mp4 and dump them into a ‘tv show’ library that PLEX could then serve to the client population.
The Mission: I was trying to get rid of this MCE machine and move the function to PLEX
The Story: I purchased the Plex Pass for one month to try the proof of concept. I confirmed that when I moved the 950Q’s from the MCE machine to the QNAP the hardware was recognized by the chassis…the problem was that PLEX didn’t discover the devices under 'Live TV & DVR" setup. Given that this wasn’t a supported tuner I started digging and found this thread. I found that the 955Q wasn’t supported under .nix so I thought I’d take a shot and insert an abstraction layer in there…THAT worked…
I ended up using the QNAP “Virtualization station” to build a Win7 virtual machine (I chose Win 7 to get a close to the machine I was replacing for troubleshooting purposes). Once the VM was there I added the PLEX service on top. I passed through the 950Q’s from the hardware to the VM and viola, PLEX discovered the devices. Now… here’s where it got weird… after the VM was installed I had been doing everything via Remote desktop (admin account) but PLEX would not initiate the channel search no matter what I tried. It didn’t initiate a successful channel scan until I accessed the VM from the virtual console. Once I did that the scan ran without issue, found channels and is working right now.
One discovery: It seems as though accessing the VM via remote desktop and initiating the channel discovery actually kicked the USB devices back to the hypervisor and everything went weird…this didn’t happen when initiating via virtual console so all is well now.
Final note: I’ve been running now for about 16 hours and all seems stable. My first scheduled recording happens in an hour…if this remains stable for the next 24 to 48 I’m calling it good and what worked for me.
-Good Luck
